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Why voters aren’t swayed by season of scandals: Cohn

Two scandals, spanning two elections, suffuse Ontario’s Liberals. Yet their hold on power gets only stronger:

Defying the odds, Kathleen Wynne won a majority government in last spring’s election. This month, the premier gained an extra seat in a Sudbury byelection.

Wynne’s two successive victories are political mysteries wrapped up in police inquiries.

The opposition framed each campaign as a referendum on alleged Liberal criminality. Yet rather than hold anyone to account, voters held their noses. Their verdict, delivered on two separate scandals, wasn’t so much “not guilty” as “not interested.”

Confounded but undaunted, Wynne’s critics are regrouping. This week, as MPPs came back to work, scandal-mongering made a comeback.

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After three years of hearings, a legislative committee finally delivered its judgment(s): a tepid main report produced by the Liberal majority, plus two thundering dissents crafted by two mutually discordant opposition parties.

Also this week, the opposition seized on a newer, newsier scandal in Sudbury, where Wynne is accused of “inducing” (a polite way of saying “bribing”) the former Liberal candidate to make way for a new star candidate by holding out the prospect of political jobs.

Happily for the opposition, both scandals have aroused the interest of the Ontario Provincial Police — responding to two formal requests from the Progressive Conservatives.

Unhappily for the opposition, both scandals have failed to rouse the Ontario public — despite the best efforts of the PCs and New Democrats, who made the allegations central to their campaigns.

It’s not for want of publicity and tenacity. On gas plants, the opposition made its case in the minority legislature of 2011-14, when the PCs and NDP called the shots in committee hearings — calling 93 witnesses and compelling hundreds of thousands of pages of document disclosures.

The scandal was the product of naked Liberal opportunism ahead of the 2011 general election — a billion-dollar boondoggle that came back to haunt them in the 2014 campaign. Yet rather than throw the Liberal bums out, voters took a close look at the opposition bums and found them wanting.

The public long ago moved on from this tangled tale, but the OPP are still on the trail. Short of criminal charges, the gas plant scandal has probably run its course. Now, the opposition has seized on the latest Sudbury scandal.

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Wynne’s deputy chief of staff, Pat Sorbara was caught on tape suggesting to past candidate Andrew Olivier that he quietly step aside from running in the byelection (Wynne would exercise her authority as party leader to block him, so his candidacy was a non-starter in any event). Sorbara dangled the possibilities of party volunteer, part-time constituency assistant (average salary $38,000), or an unspecified government appointment as consolation prizes. The OPP claim, in a document submitted to the courts seeking access to the tapes, that there are “reasonable and probable grounds” that a crime had been committed.

Would a judge conclude that Olivier, a well-to-do mortgage broker, would consider a $38,000 job offer, or a volunteer party position, to be a serious inducement? Or that an unspecified government appointment would do the trick? Unlikely.

That said, as long as OPP gumshoes traipse through the Sudbury slime at the behest of the opposition, should Wynne take off her blinkers and tell Sorbara to step aside? Absolutely.

Patronage politics is never pretty, but all three parties play the game. As the Liberals slyly point out, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath has handed taxpayer-funded jobs to two of her defeated MPPs. And the Tories rewarded one of their MPPs with a party job when she surrendered her seat.

People know from bitter experience that no party has a monopoly on duplicity and complicity. Voters aren’t dumb, or easily dumbfounded.

They know the Liberals are guilty of duplicity and deletions over those cancelled gas plants. And that the Liberals are guilty of patronage politics. Unable to keep blaming former premier Dalton McGuinty for the sins of her own premiership, Wynne is slowly burning through her political capital.

But voters won’t be easily swayed by opposition parties that purport to be scandalized by scandals that are, candidly, standard operating procedure. A well rehearsed show of indignation won’t win over voters.

In this season of scandals, after running two losing campaigns accusing Wynne of criminality, will the Tories and New Democrats keep repeating themselves? Judging by their first week back at work, the opposition never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

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